Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
According to a concerning trend piece on the current ‘dating apocalypse’ of twentysomethings, hookup culture has hit a critical mass of excess and indulgence, and the kids are not alright—they are, in fact, all fucked out with nobody to love. RIP going steady. The piece comes courtesy of Vanity Fair via journo Nancy Jo Sales,…
Google could launch an effort to keep trolls and bad information at bay, with a program that would rank websites according to veracity, and sort results according to those rankings. Currently, the search engine ranks pages according to popularity, which means that pages containing unsubstantiated celebrity gossip or conspiracy theories, for example, show up very…
“My dearest Ulmus,” the message began. “As I was leaving St. Mary’s College today I was struck, not by a branch, but by your radiant beauty. You must get these messages all the time. You’re such an attractive tree.” This is an excerpt of a letter someone wrote to a green-leaf elm, one…
3. While Bieber sharing nude photos of himself is not a new thing, the large majority of his fans were very excited by the snap. The photo has had over 2 million likes. Of the 600,000 comments, the majority of fans declared their love for Bieber, used heart-eyed emojis, and/or asked him to “turn around”….
Charlie Hales, the mayor of Portland, Ore., was running a zoning hearing last December when he missed a call on his cell from David Plouffe, the campaign mastermind behind Barack Obama’s ascent. Although Hales had never met him, Plouffe left a voice mail that had an air of charming familiarity, reminiscing about the 2008 rally…
It took only five years for what once seemed like a fuzzy idea—limos on demand—to become the source of violence in the streets. Credit Photograph by Jean-Paul Pelissier/REUTERS Most people know the story of the Luddites, but it is still a tale worth repeating, especially in light of recent protests over Uber. Luddites were…
When Facebook released its workplace diversity numbers on Thursday, the company included a somewhat heartening message. “It’s clear to all of us that we still aren’t where we want to be,” Maxine Williams, Facebook’s global head of diversity, wrote. “There’s more work to do.” But it was almost exactly the same thing Ms. Williams said…
Slack, maker of extremely expensive professional chatrooms, is annexing online work culture at a stunning rate. The industry narrative doesn’t quite cover it! Sure, a lot of companies are signing up and closing their Campfire chats, their Hipchats and their IRCs. But the thing about Slack that gives you that low dread of unstoppable acceleration…
Published on Jun 21, 2015 Online harassment is a major problem, but it’s rarely prosecuted. If only we’d been warned about this in the early days of the internet. Category Entertainment License Standard YouTube License Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Online Harassment (HBO) – YouTube.
It wasn’t until I heard that a colleague had nuked his personal email account—on purpose, for good—that it hit me: Email is the most reviled personal technology ever. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief at BuzzFeed, was so fed up with email that he did the 21st-century equivalent of unlisting his phone number and…